An important consideration in a person's health is sleep. The consensus in the medical field today considers sleep, diet, and exercise to function as three pillars crucial to a person's health. Lack of sleep may contribute to an increase in illness such as heart disease, stroke, cancer, chronic respiratory diseases, obesity and diabetes. Moreover, lack of sleep may also increase accidents. For example, a lack of sleep may cause an increase in accidents on and off of a job.
Professional help exists that may improve a person's sleep. For example, professional help exists that may focus mainly on treating medically diagnosable sleep disorders. However, there are limited options for people without serious sleep disorders, such as sleep apnea, restless leg, chronic insomnia, or with a diagnosed mental illness, to receive help to improve their sleep habits. For example, for people without medically diagnosed or diagnosable sleep conditions, finding quality sleep advice becomes difficult as they must rely on basic information from a General Practitioner. In another example, people must rely on self-directed treatment methods.
Moreover, in many instances options for people seeking sleep assistance may be limited to: expensive medical programs which often treat sleep conditions with medical devices and/or prescription medicines; professional advice from mental health providers who may offer limited supervision and/or advice on how to modify sleep behaviors; advice from general practitioners who may provide the person with standardized information about the need for better sleep and/or offer prescription sleep aids; self-help methods such as over-the-counter medicines; non-certified sleep improvement applications on mobile devices; and advice websites that make suggestions for improving sleep.
While websites and mobile applications may provide people with options that can help improve sleep quality, they are self-directed support options and do not offer personal, professional assistance. To achieve guided support when modifying sleep behaviors, consumers must rely on medical help through sleep clinics or with the assistance of a sleep doctor. There are currently no consumer-level sleep counseling programs for the general public to engage in preventative sleep modification.
Additionally, within the sleep improvement industry there are proven tools to improve sleep health. For example, people with sleep apnea may be provided with continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machines that assist them with breathing. As another example, people who suffer from insomnia may be provided with sleep medications. Further, people who have mental illness may receive coaching from a mental health care professional as part of a treatment. However, people without these types of serious mental or physical health problems may find help improving their sleep with over the counter medications, by following information provided in advice columns, websites, etc., or they may find help by reducing stress through exercise.
In some instances, people may not improve their sleep for various reasons. For example, people with medically diagnosed sleep apnea may find the CPAP machine uncomfortable and choose not to use it. In another example, people taking medication may find that the medication does not adequately treat the condition and/or have unwanted side effects. In these examples, people who try to follow methods to improve their sleep behaviors without the aid of the CPAP machine or medication may not be successful. For example, people who try to follow methods to improve their sleep behaviors without the aid of CPAP machines or medication may find that they are unable to complete self-help improvement programs without guided support. Further, people may also find that information received from General Practitioners, websites, self-help sources, is inaccurate, out of date, impersonal, and/or does not provide the type of quality assistance they require.
Further, the cost associated with medical programs to improve sleep habits can be prohibitive. For example, people may choose to forego treatment programs, even when they are motivated to improve their sleep habits because the cost to participate in the medical programs can be too expensive and cost prohibitive. Moreover, in order to receive treatment at a sleep clinic or from a centerfield sleep professional people may have to have a qualifying condition prior to approval for treatment. In addition, people may encounter co-pays that are too expensive and cost prohibitive. For people without a qualifying condition, but who still wish to receive personal support to modify their sleep behaviors may also find that costs (e.g., out-of-the pocket costs) may be too expensive and cost prohibitive. Furthermore, sleep treatment may be difficult or impossible for people to find since the demand for sleep treatment may be high and/or space may not be available to provide them with a facility and/or service.
People who choose to make use of self-directed methods to improve their sleep may also face difficulties that lead to failure. For example, because people are using self-directed methods, they may not make the correct choices to provide them with the optimum treatment options to suit their needs. Their lack of expertise wastes their time and money on options that fail to correct their unhealthy sleep habits. People who fail to improve their sleep behavior may then endure unhealthy sleep habits that translate into higher incidents of illness and accidents and a decrease in productivity that negatively impacts the overall US economy.
Accordingly, there remains a need in the art for sleep programs found between the highly prescribed medical options and the unsupported self-help options, the sleep programs providing personalized counseling that follows well-researched and medically designed sleep behavioral improvement programs.